Mark Shuttleworth: "I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say." He's right. Lots of interesting insights in this blog post - I may not agree with everything Ubuntu does, but at least it's doing something.

Agreed re Linux user elitism. However, there seems to me to be an unquestioned assumption in the more populist Linux circles that end users want tons and tons of eyecandy.

In my experience, this is incorrect - and really I think it's another kind of elitism. ("End users are stupid, let's put in lots of blinkenlights to keep them interested.") Geeks care that their desktop looks good. Most end users don't even change the default wallpaper. Users like prettiness, but given a choice between better looks and better usability, I would bet on most people choosing usability.

And Canonical has consistently spammed the eyecandy since Unity came out, while letting bugs go unfixed and features unimplemented...

Why do you think Ubuntu's popularity has declined? Why do you think Windows 8 isn't selling as fast as Microsoft thought? It's because most people want their computer to be a tool, not a toy.